Core drilling operations for the Cooper Basin Area project encompassed more than 1200 oil and gas wells, 300 major processing centres and 5600 kilometres of pipeline.

Liquefied natural gas drilling projects also had the potential to significantly increase Santos' size by 2014.

The Exadata rack was expected to underpin several projects planned for coming years that Benn labelled as "huge" for oil and gas companies.

However, the company had remained with a quarter-rack Exadata deployment for the time being.

The Exadata configuration was chosen after side-by-side tests with the current configuration and another, unnamed alternate provider.

Despite attempts by Benn's team to provide a fair game for the alternate provider in multiple proofs of concept, the Exadata remained "miles ahead" in performance.

"[Oracle founder] Larry Ellison was quoting things [at OpenWorld] that were 10 to 15 times quicker and then apologising for the applications that were only two or three times quicker," Benn said. "I'll take two or three times any day, the additional stuff is the gravy.

"If the technology can see better ways of running certain snippets of code in the SQL queries, the challenge should go back to the application vendors - why aren't your guys writing the code to be as 'performant' without this kit so we can get the incremental performance of this kit as well, again?"

Reaching for the holy grail

The quarter-rack Exadata hardware was configured for redundancy with identical kit in Santos' other data centre, also in Adelaide.

The two sites were continually maintained for the same data integrity with a patch-and-release deployment of technical bundles and information.

"It's a lot quicker than the very convoluted, very complex combined environment we had previously," he said.

"We're driving towards the holy grail of no downtime at all.

"Even though Santos is very much an Asian and Australia-centric company a lot of the work we're doing at the moment is truly global... it's all very well scheduling downtime for Sunday morning Adelaide, it still has a significant impact on the rest of the business elsewhere."

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